Mason's Reflection on Google Lively

The Digiteen Dream Team has made a good run for it. We have gotten out to people all over the world and have told them about how Lively can be a good use in teaching kids digital citizenship and how to stay safe on the internet. My part on the project was to publish blog posts, so other people can see how great of a product this could really be. Some of the other students have been doing other things to get out to people. Such as posting two things on Lively. One is a crazy rap song that some of our students made up and posted it on youtube. The other one is just them begging for Google to stop shutting down Lively. Another group has sent some stuff to some popular local media's, they can possibly publish it in the newspaper, or on the news. The last group has sent a letter to Google to try to persuade them that Lively can be a great source to teach young kids how to act on the internet.

My favorite place was stairway to Heaven because I love the beach and it reminded me of going there. It is also the last place where we went into lively as a group. My avatar's name was Dean15.

I created blog posts for the protest against Google. One of the posts that Tanner B. and I did was called What we're doing to take things further. It was explaining what the other groups were doing to get the word out about the protest. The other post that I wrote was called 10 Ways Lively Can Make Money. In this post, we gave some ideas about Lively can make money for Google.

There are some effective measures of blogging. One of them is to blog a lot so other people will recognize you and your work. Pictures and videos are effective measures because when people see pictures or videos, it attracts them to your page. I have posted two pictures on this blog about my avatar.
A good way to analyze a blog's ranking is to use a program called Technorati.Technorati is a program so you can see your ranking and other comments on what other people have said about you. You analyze a blog's traffic by using a program called StatCounter. StatCounter allows you to see what kind of visitors you have, where they come from, and how many times they have read your blog post. When a blog post is a great idea then everybody is going to read it. Blogging is a great way to get the word out on what you need to be known.

There are many ways you can build traffic to their blog. One way is contacting various news centers about the cause and giving them a link to your blog. Another way is to comment on popular blogs telling them about the cause. Holding major events helps your blog pick up more traffic.

I do feel that the effort was worth it, because we just did not work on it for nothing. We used Lively to teach younger students on how to act on the internet and how to avoid predators. We were not going to let it die. I learned how to protest and blog on the internet. Both of these can be huge assets in the future. Just take a chance. It is like sending your kid to school and he or she might or might not get hurt.

We are testing a new virtual world called Open Sim. I think that teaching in a virtual world is good. It is a fun teaching experience for us as well as the students. I would like to continue the teaching. If Open Sim is as good as Lively, I cannot wait.